Mentors at the PhD Workshop

Nandini Sundar is Professor of Sociology, Delhi School of Economics, Delhi University, and Co-editor, Contributions to Indian Sociology. She has previously worked at the Centre for the Study of Law and Governance, Jawaharlal Nehru University, the Institute of Economic Growth, Delhi and the University of Edinburgh.

Her publications include Subalterns and Sovereigns: An Anthropological History of Bastar (2nd ed. OUP, 2007), published in Hindi as Gunda Dhur Ki Talash Mein (Penguin 2009), and Branching Out: Joint Forest Management in India (OUP, 2001). She is editor of Legal Grounds: Natural Resources, Identity and the Law in Jharkhand (OUP 2009) and also co-editor of Anthropology in the East: The founders of Indian sociology and anthropology (Permanent Black, 2007), and A New Moral Economy for India's Forests: Discourses of Community and Participation (Sage Publications, 1999).

Her current teaching and research interests include citizenship, war and counterinsurgency in South Asia, indigenous identity and politics in India, the sociology of law, and inequality.

Paul Bailey is Professor of modern Chinese history, School of History,Classics & Archaeology, University of Edinburgh. Primary research interests are in the gender, social, and cultural history of modern China, and Sino-French interaction in the 19th and 20th centuries.

Publications include Gender and Education in China (London: Routledge, 2007). China in the Twentieth Century (Oxford: Blackwells, 2001); Strengthen the Country and Enrich the People (Richmond:Curzon, 1998); Postwar Japan (Oxford: Blackwells, 1996); Reform the People (Edinburgh:Edinburgh University Press,1990).

Recently Paul Bailey has embarked on a new research project that explores the links between crime, gender and nation-building in twentieth century China.

Courses taught: Modern Chinese, Japanese and Vietnamese history; East Asian Civilisation; Chinese political texts; gender and Chinese cinema.

Anne Bayard-Sakai is Director of the Centre d'Etudes Japonaises (INALCO) and Lecturer of Japanese language and literature at INALCO (Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales), Paris. The main focus of her research is modern and contemporary Japanese literature.

Former student of the Ecole Normale Supérieure and agrégée (highest teaching diploma in France) in philosophy, she obtained her PhD at the Université Paris 7. She taught at the Université Lille 3 before being appointed at the INALCO. In addition to her career as a teacher and researcher, Anne Bayard-Sakai is also a translator. She has translated works of many Japanese writers including Ooka Shôhei, Kawabata Yasunari, Oe Kenzaburô, Tanizaki Junichirô. 

Ravinder Kaur is Associate Professor, South Asian Studies, University of Copenhagen. She is interested in themes of postcolonial state formations, modern identity making, imagery, visual representations and everyday politics of space.

Her previous projects were located in post-Partition Delhi and post-revolution Tehran. While she explored the making of postcolonial citizenship, memory, identity among Punjabi refugees vis-a-vis the state's resettlement programmes in Delhi, she focused on the Shia tradition of 'martyrdom' as a governmental practice, and its new forms of internalization within the the modern Iranian state.

Currently, Ravinder Kaur is working on the idea of neoliberal India as a 'global nation', and the changing forms of postcolonial nation-states.


Jørgen Delman is Professor, Chinese Studies, University of Copenhagen. His primary research areas are China: Politics and governance; business and politics; civil society; science and technology; climate and energy politics; development post 1949.

Jørgen Delman is currently working on the following research projects:

  • Unlocking China's business environment - business, policy making, and governance in China
  • The transformation of China's civil society
  • China's green energy and climate stance: New challenges in a globalizing world (under preparation).

The courses he teaches focus on China - modern society and politics.